Items Vol. 17 No. 2 (1963)

Page 1

SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL

I VOLUME 17 NUMBER 2 JUNE 1963 230 PARK AVENUE NEW YORK 17, N. Y.

SOME COMPARISONS OF LArIN AMERICAN AND ASIAN STUDIES WlrH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO RESEARCH ON JAPAN by Ronald P. Dore ""

A _

IT IS not easy to generalize meaningfully about differences in the approaches of American social scientists to the study of Latin America and of Japan; there is approximately the same diversity in assumptions and preoccupations and theoretical frameworks. One meets the same fashionable jargon metaphors of thrusts and drives and mixes and inputs; there is the same evidence of terminological confusion, the same fondness for those protean words like "modernization," "development," "nationalism," which can mean all things to all men and consequently nothing precise to anyone; and in conference discussions there are the same occasional bouts of linguistic self-consciousness when the confusion becomes plain and attempts are made to define (though I have never heard Asian scholars reach such an advanced stage of terminological agnosticism that they questioned the proper use of words like "writer" and "peasant," as happened during this conference). In these respects the differences seem greater between disciplines than between students of different areas. Economists more often know what they are talking about than do other social scientists because more of the economist's terms are clearly related to quantitative measures. The economist can define economic growth

• The author is Reader in Sociology with special reference to the Far East at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The present paper is a condensed version of one he prepared for the Conference on Continuity and Change in Latin America, held by the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies, of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council, at Scottsdale, Arizona, on January 110 - February 2 (see Items, March . . 9611, p. 5). The complete paper is to be published with the others . , repared for the conference in a volume edited by John J. Johnson, of Stanford University, by the Stanford University Press; the present paper is printed here with its permission.

in terms of an increase in per capita Gross National Product at constant prices, and discussion can proceed with a clear idea of the issues at stake. Sociologists and political scientists are much less certain of the connotations of social or political "development" and sometimes they can even be heard arguing in fruitlessly essentialist terms about what such words really mean. CONTRASTS BETWEEN STUDENTS OF THE TWO AREAS Some differences between the students of the two areas are largely determined by the nature of the areas studied. In the first place, students of Asia tend to be more narrowly specialized. There are a few who take Southeast Asia as their oyster, some who bestraddle China and Japan, but most confine their research to only one society. By contrast, one hears of Latin Americanists, but not of Bolivianists or Peruvianists. The advantages of such a global, or at least semihemispherical, approach are not immediately obvious. It is not easy for anyone man to know enough about so many different societies, and the attempt to be comprehensive may lead to a diffusion of energy-to the quick survey of formal structure rather than the detailed analysis of process. The attempt to arrive ~ descriptive generalizations seems in any case to be of dubious value. The predicate of any sentence beginning, say, "Students in Latin America ... " is likely to be so general, so vague, and so hedged about with qualifications as to be neither informative nor useful. On the other hand, Latin America does provide excellent opportunities for the kind of comparative soci13


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